Simple And Fun Science Experiments For Kids

Pinball Science 2.1 (Jewel Case)
Price: 5.95


I Love Science! - CD
Price: 4.95


I Love Spelling Math and Science 3-pack
Price: 13.37


My First Amazing Science Explorer 2.1 - CD
Price: 4.95


Mias Science Adventure: Romains New Hat 2CD set- Box
Price: 9.99

Create your own tongue map! Your tongue is your main taste organ. You also use your tongue to chew and swallow your food. Your tongue is covered with tiny spots called taste buds. They allow you to notice the difference between the four tastes - sweet, salty, sour and bitter.

EXPERIMENT #1 - MAP YOUR TONGUE

There are four areas on your tongue which pick up different tastes. Find them by making a map of the tongue.

Things you will need:

1. Four sheets of paper
2. A pencil
3. Water
4. Sugar
5. Salt
6. Vinegar or lemon juice
7. Strong, black tea or coffee
8. Paper tissues
9. Four saucers
10. A glass, or plastic dropper, or a small teaspoon

Instructions:

1. First, label four of the sheets of paper as sweet, salty, sour and bitter.

2. In one saucer, dissolve some sugar in water. Place this saucer on the paper marked 'sweet'.

3. In another saucer, dissolve some salt in water. Place this on the paper market 'salty'.

4. In a third saucer, mix the vinegar or lemon juice with an equal amount of water. Put this on the paper market 'sour'.

5. Pour the tea into the last saucer. Place this on the paper marked 'bitter'.

6. Now you are ready to map your tongue! Ask your friend to stick their tongue out. Copy its outline on a sheet of paper.

7. Now divide the tongue up into four or more areas,as shown in the picture.

8. Dry your friend's tongue with a paper tissue and place a drop of 'sweet' on the tip of their tongue.

If he/she can taste the sweetness, mark that part of your map 'sweet'. Do the same for the other three liquids. Rinse with water after each tasting.

9. Now do the same for all the areas of the tongue, but test the liquids in a different order each time.

What does your tongue map show? Does each area of your tongue pick up a different taste?

More Useful Pages :

The Tongue and Regions of Taste

Tongue Maps for Coffee

Wine Education Topic: Is the Tongue Taste Map a Myth?

The Tongue Map: Tasteless Myth Debunked

Smells are really chemicals floating about in the air. Your nose has special parts called receptors that respond to these smells. If the right chemical appears, a receptor sends a message along the nerves to your brain. Your brain decides whether smells are 'nice' or 'nasty'. As far as your nose can tell, they are just different kinds of chemical.

Smell is important to us because it helps our sense of taste. Your tongue can only pick up the four basic tastes - sweet, salty, sour and bitter. It's your nose that makes tomatoes taste like tomatoes and apples like apples. Without a sense of smell, they would not taste the same.

EXPERIMENT #2 - HOLD YOUR NOSE!

You can test the sense of smell by feeding different foods to a friend who is blindfolded and holding his or her nose. All the food should be cut into roughly the same size pieces.

Things you will need:

1. A knife
2. A scarf
3. Some food, such as apple, celery, melon, potato, carrot and onion

Instructions:

1. Cut up the food into pieces. Use the scarf to blindfold your friend and make sure your friend is holding their nose.

2. Now feed each of these foods in turn to your friend. Give the onion last, otherwise its strong taste might spoil the other tastes. Can your friend tell you what the different foods are?

3. Now ask your friend to try each food again, but hold another type of food under their nose at the same time. Does the smell make the taste different?

More Interesting Pages :

How Smell Works

Smell Disorders

Smell-O-Vision

Your Sense of Smell

Your skin is like a coat that protects your body. It keeps the rain and wind out. It also has many other jobs to do. In your skin, there are nerves that can sense pain, temperature and pressure. These nerves send messages to your brain and give you your sense of touch.

Touching gives you different kinds of sensation. Close your eyes and run your fingers over some objects around you. What sort of messages are your fingertips receiving?

EXPERIMENT #3 - HOT AND COLD

Does your body feel temperature changes as accurately as a thermometre? Find out by following this experiment.

Things you will need:

1. Hot and cold water
2. Three glass jars

Instructions:

1. Fill one jar with water that is hot, but not too hot to put your finger in. Fill the other jar with cold water, or iced water if available. In the third jar, make a mixture of the two.

2. Place the forefinger of one hand into the jar of hot water, and the forefinger of your other hand into the jar of cold water. Leave them there for a few minutes.

3. Now take both fingers out, and immediately put them into the third jar. What are your fingers telling you about the temperature of the water? Are they saying the same thing?

More Useful Pages :

Skin Anatomy

Identify Skin Problems, Skin Growth, Bacterial Infections

Taking Care of Your Skin

Astronauts experiment on skin care

When we use both our eyes, we have a kind of sight called stereoscopic vision. Because both eyes are at the front, they both see the same object. But your eyes are a little way apart from each other, so they each have a slightly different view of things. You can check this if you place two objects, such as drinking glasses, on a table in front of you. Place one about 20 centimetres away from you, the other 60 centimetres away. Put your chin on the table with the two glasses straight ahead of you. Close one eye, then the other. Do you see exactly the same thing with both eyes?

Your brain makes use of the fact that your eyes tell different stories. By comparing the messages from each eye, it works out how far away an object is. Your brain does this in a split second every time you look at anything.

EXPERIMENT #4 - TWO EYES ARE BETTER THAN ONE

Why are our eyes on the front of our head and both looking the same way? It seems a waste of an eye, doesn't it? To discover the answer, play this game of throwing and catching a ball with a friend.

Things you will need:

1. Stiff black paper or cloth
2. Scissors
3. A sharp pencil
4. A ball
5. Thin elastic or ribbon

Instructions:

1. Cut out an eyepatch from the paper or cloth. Using the pencil point, make a small hole on either side of the patch. Thread through the elastic or ribbon.

2. Play at catching the ball with both eyes first. Throw the bal 20 times and make a record of how often you drop a catch.

3. Now cover one eye with your patch. Keep a record for another 20 catches. Did you do as well?

More Related Info :

Student Stereoscope

3-D eye exercises, games, puzzles, vision therapy

Augmented Reality: Stereoscopic Vision for the Blind

Physiology: Binocular & Stereoscopic Vision

Bifocal Stereoscopic Vision for Intelligent Vehicles

Your brain is the most remarkable organ in your body! It sends out and receives hundreds of messages every second of your life. Your brain controls your muscles, sense organs, temperature - even your appetite! Your brain is also the place where you do your thinking and remembering.

Your brain plays a very important part in your body's co-ordination. It controls the messages from your muscles and sense organs. When you stand on your toes, your brain receives messages from your eyes, ears and joints about the position of your body. At the same time, your brain tells your muscles what to do to keep your body balanced.

EXPERIMENT #5- WATCH YOUR BRAIN AT WORK!

All you need for this experiment is a narrow cardboard tube, or a sheet of paper rolled up to make a tube.

Instructions:

1. Look out of the window and hold the tube to your right eye. Close your left eye to check what your right eye is seeing. Now open both eyes. What can you see? The left eye is seeing the whole scene, and the right eye is seeing only a tiny part of it.

2. Stil with both eyes open, hold your left hand up in front of you. Slowly bring it across, towards the tube of paper, until it covers the view from the tube. At a certain point, you should see your left hand with a hole in the middle of the palm. What can you see through the hole?

3. Still holding the tube to your eye, hold a finger up in front of it. Is there a hole in your finger? Can you explain the difference?

EXPERIMENT #6

You can grow some crystals for yourself by adding washing soda to a jar of hot water. After a few days in a warm room, the crystals will begin to grow.

Things you will need:

1. String
2. A teaspoon
3. Hot water
4. A papeclip
5. A pencil
6. Washing soda crystals
7. Two glass jars
8 A small bowl

Instructions:

1. Put the teaspoon into the jar and fill up the jar with hot water.

2. Add a few teaspoons of washing soda to the water and stir the mixture. Add some more washing soda and stir the mixture again.

3. Fill the bowl with hot water and stand the jar in it. Keep on adding more soda to the jar and keep stirring until the soda stops dissolving in the water. Allow the liquid to cool and pour it into the second jar.

4. Tie a paperclip to one end of the string. Tie the other end across the pencil. Place the pencil across the top of the jar so that the paperclip hangs in the water. After a few days you will have a large lump of cyrstals.

Check out these really useful pages on Crystals

Fun Science - How to Grow Crystals
Science Fair Crystals
How to Grow Crystals
Top Crystals You Can Grow

Meteorologists measure the speed of the wind with an anemometer, and the amount of moisture with a hygrometer. These instruments are used in weather stations on the ground, or in aircraft, ships and weather balloons. Meteorologists use the information from these instruments to forecast what the weather is going to be like.

EXPERIMENT #7 - HOW MUCH MOISTURE IS THERE IN THE AIR?

You can make your own hygrometer. Keep a chart of your results every day for three weeks. Can you forecast whether it will be wet or dry during the fourth week?

Things you will need:

1. A Pencil
2. A ruler
3. A piece of thin card, 16 cm x 4 cm
4. A piece of stiff card, 24 cm x 30 cm
5. A pair of scissors
6. Sticky tape
7. A strand of hair, about 25 cm long
8. A piece of wood, 24 cm x 4 cm x 4 cm
9. Six drawing pins
10. A coloured pen with a fine point

Instructions:

1. Using the ruler, draw an arrow about 12 centimetres by 2 centimetres on the thin card. Cut out the card arrow.

2. Stick one end of the strand of hair to the top of the cliff card.

3. Using drawing pins, attach the stiff card to the long edge of the piece of wood

4. Attach the free end of the hair to the back of the arrow head.

5. Place the arrow against the card and move it until the hair is stretched out fully. Then attach the other end of the arrow to the card with a drawing pin

6. Stand the hygrometer outside. Make sure that it can't fall over. When the Sun is shining, mark on the card where the arrow is pointing. Write 'dry' by the side of this mark. When the weather is damp, the arrow will point lower. Mark its new position and write 'damp' on the card.

On a damp day, the strand of hair will absorb moisture from the air. This will make the hair stretch and so the arrow points lower. On dry, sunny days the hair dries out and becomes shorter.

Check out the following pages to get more ideas :

Weather Related Science Projects for Kids (and their parents)

Weather Instruments

Make Your Own Weather Station

Pictures Of Weather Instruments I constructed

Energy from the Sun warms the ground, and some of this heat is reflected back to the air. As the warm air rises, it cools down. Places that are high above sea-level, such as mountains, have cooler climates than places lower down.

Energy from the Sun warms the oceans, rivers and lakes, turning some of the water into vapour. This vapour rises to form clouds, and then falls back to Earth as rain, sleet, hail or snow. So places near the coast have wetter climates than places island.

EXPERIMENT #8

Things you will need:

1. A small ball
2. A torch

Instructions:

1. Hold the ball in one hand. Shine the torch beam directly onto the middle of the ball. The circle of bright light at the centre of the ball is similar to the Sun's rays shining at the Equator.

2. Now look at how the light is shining at the bottom of the ball. It is spread over a much wider area and is very dull right at the bottom. This shows how the Sun shines in the polar regions.

P.S : If you're interested in the Solar Sytem, check out this really fantastic presentation on the anatomy of a black hole.

More Related Pages :

The Orbit of the Moon around the Sun is Convex!

Everything About The Sun

How Big Is The Sun?

Global warming: Will the Sun come to our rescue?

How fresh is the air where you live? If you live in the countryside, it is probably clean and fresh. We need air to breathe. Fresh air contains oxygen which we need to live. Although there are small amounts of other gases in the air, these are harmless to us.

But near our towns and cities, the air contains many other substances which can harm us. We make most of these harmful substances ourselves. One of these is sulphur dioxide, which comes from burning some types of coal, and oil. Power stations and factories burn coal and oil to produce the energy we use. Other gases and chemicals escape from the factory chimneys and pollute the air.

EXPERIMENT #9 - TEST THE AIR

Make an air filter to catch small particles of waste material in the air.

Thing you will need:

1. A paper tissue
2. An elastic band
3. A microscope or magnifying glass

Instructions:

1. Take an empty glass jar and fix a slightly damp paper tissue over the top with an elastic band.

2. Go outside and stand the jar up in the wind in an open space.

3. Leave it there for a day. Then bring it indoors and examine the tissue with a microscope or a magnifying glass.

The tissue will have collected various bits and pieces of material. Some, like pollen from flowers, will be natural. Others, like particles of soot, will be artificial waste products.

Try the experiment again when it's raining and see what happens this time around.

More Related Pages :

Air Composition

Uses Of Air

Compressed Air

How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air